Portable Loading Setup

This really wasn't much of a project but  I have to do something besides post pictures of pretty girls once in a while so what the heck.

When we moved out of the dilapidated, spider-filled old farmhouse some twenty years ago, we wound up in a house in a subdivision of half-acre lots.  They frown on shooting off your back porch in such places but that  wasn't particularly troublesome at first because there was so much undeveloped land around that finding a place to shoot wasn't difficult.  Unfortunately, that changed.

I don't do as much loading or shooting as I'd like because Its a pain in the butt to load up a bunch of different combinations of components, drive an hour to my shooting place and hope one of them turns out to be a decent load.   What I needed was a way to take the loading bench to the shooting place.  I got around to making that possible today.

Ruth, the old Jeep, has become my portable reloading bench.  Big surprise. 

I have a few different presses and most are mounted on pieces of  2 x 6 that are drilled in a  common  three hole pattern so I can put any press I want on my loading table.  The length of the 2 x 6 varies with how much overhang the specific press needs but the hole pattern is always the same.  That gave me a starting place.  All I had to do was adapt the 2 x 6 to the Jeep and I'd have a portable loading bench.

What I came up with was pretty simple.  A piece of angle iron bolts to the back end of the 2 x 6.  It anchors the back of the 2 x 6 to the winch.

This positions the board cantilevered over the top of the bumper.  The U-bolts secure the board to the bumper.  Wing nuts make it  all easy to remove or install. 

 When its all installed, it places the press at a comfortable height.

The press itself is an old C-H press that I got at a Death Bazaar   Gun Show several years ago for fifteen bucks.  Despite its age, its in good condition and is still nice and tight.  It was one of those deals that was too good to pass up even though I had no need for it at the time.  Stuff like that usually comes in handy down the road.

A second part of the plan is to make a little platform with adjustable feet for a powder scale.  I can use a powder scale because Ruth has a hard top and wind won't be much of a problem.  The adjustable feet will make it possible to level the platform as long as the Jeep isn't parked on too much of a slope.  I looked at electronic reloading scales but I don't really need one to make this work.   I'd be done with the little platform by now but I bought two different sizes of the nuts that make the feet adjustable so it only has two feet right now.  I 'm not going to make a special trip to get the right ones so finishing that will have to wait for tomorrow.

In the mean time, I suspect that I have the only reloading bench in town that gets eleven miles to the gallon.